SOLO: An Underrated Star Wars Gem by Geoff Jackson

As our annual Star Wars holiday rolls around — May the 4th, as in “May the Fourth Be With You” — I look to one of my favorite Star Wars movies to provide a platform for cinematic reflection: 2018’s SOLO: A Star War Story.  

While not the most well-received of movies into official cannon, it’s nonetheless one of the best, most tight and cogent bits of filmmaking set in the galaxy far, far away.  Let me delve deeper into an analysis to share with you what about the film makes it great.  In a nutshell: nostalgia, characters, and pacing.  

The nostalgia is STRONG with this one!  Who doesn’t love Han Solo, Chewbacca, and the Millennium Falcon?  Mix in a little Lando Calrissian, some awesome new droids and aliens, new and familiar locations, and you’re off to the races ( … in under 12 parsecs)!   

Here we find out the history of the Solo surname, how space ships are won or lost in galactic card games, and how the revered smuggler and his sidekick first meet.  If you’re a Star Wars fan, you know you’ve thought about all these things — for a long, long time, actually.  

All the characters are great.  We have lovable scoundrels we’re familiar with, some first-generation space-OG’s (played by Woody Harrelson and Thandi Newton), a socially progressive new droid with a penchant for human physicality (voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a strong and seductive girlfriend for Han Solo (Emilia Clark, the “Mother of Dragons”), and a sophisticated-but-menacing villain (played by the Marvel veteran Paul Bettany).  

I find I care about these people and can accept all of them seamlessly into Star Wars lore.  Director Ron Howard does most of them justice — though he does kill-off Thandi Newton a bit too soon — and the plot progresses and the story arcs happen because strong acting and good characterization are on full display.  

Of course there’s the loss of Harrison Ford the viewer needs to accommodate — and that’s a really big hurdle, admittedly — but it’s worth looking past; the rewards of accepting Alden Ehrenreich as the famous protagonist are immediate and plentiful, and he’s worth the price of admission.  

Lastly, the pacing is near-perfect.  It’s a three act play: the backstory and set up, the midsection and train-heist, and the third act mission and redemption.  At no point does anything drag or falter.  The movie’s quick, zippy, and loaded with Easter eggs — even if Darth Maul has no right to resurface anywhere near this thing.    

It starts off like a shot (with a fast-paced getaway sequence) and accelerates so steadily that, by the end, you might have to watch the last 20 minutes two or three times: double-crosses become triple-crosses and alliances shift rapidly.  It’s worth following the head games and fake-outs to see what happens and best understand how things really play-out.  

In sum, SOLO’s an old-time western, modernized and set in space, jacked-up on steroids, and augmented by familiar special effects.  What’s not to love?  

Answering that question honestly— I’d say optics.  To be fair, everything has a weird orange haze over it and whole action scenes are lost by strange color selections: looking at you, fighting Wookies on Kessel!  Similarly, all the first act battle scenes are impenetrable due to really bad lighting.  

But honestly, the color issues get outweighed by the overall goodness I’ve described above.  See the movie for yourself, or watch it again with these observations in mind; you’ll find it’s a fine Star Wars film - - one that not only gets better with age, but does so by dealing less with space wizards and empires, and more so with nostalgia, characterization, and near-perfect pacing.  

Make the jump to light-speed and May the 4th Be With You!